PAD 505 Assignment 4 2013-2014 budget

2013-2014 Budget for Pennsylvania Department of Human Service

Name

School

Instructor

Date due

2013-2014 Budget for Pennsylvania Department of Human Service

Pennsylvania Agency is committed to providing the best services in the development of childhood in early stages. The main role of the department is to promote juvenile justice and fairness to the children found in criminal acts. Providing autism services to the children with mental development challenges and providing essential living programs to people who are physically challenged and those that require healthcare services. The agency has a total of seven offices for instance the Office of Medical Assistance Programs which provide and purchase healthcare residents. This program and others require capital and management for them to function appropriately. To accomplish these tasks there is capital availability. A budget is therefore important to provide a plan on how capital will be divided among the agency’s activities (James, C. M. (2006). This paper illustrates the budget for 2013-2014 fiscal years, the problems observed and the recommendations to rectify the problem.

Table 1: 2013-2014 budget for Pennsylvania Agency

The table above shows that the Agency has increased the amount allocation from the financial year 2013 to the expenditures of 2014. This is because in every amount that was allocated in 2013 there is a more than 1% increase in the 2014 budget. Despite the amount spent on public assistance which shows a deviation of 6.4 % from the 2013 expenditure. From Table 1 above we can also note that total expenditures are high than the revenue collected in the Fiscal year 2014 and 2013. For the revenue, the percentage change was 1.7% whereas for the expenditure it was 8.3%. The range shows that the expenditure has grown faster with a difference of 3.6%.

Challenges in the organization

One of the challenges in the Pennsylvania department of human services is over estimation and under estimation. Some programs are overlooked while others are under looked. When the management overlooks or under look some activities there might be an issue in the planning and accomplishment of the organization’s goals and objectives (James, 2006). The company ought to take all the programs equally important without specifications on tastes, preferences and wants. For instance the organization may be very much concerned with the autism children and allocate more funds to the program which taking less concern on those children in the juvenile courts.

Another major issue in budgeting is availability of static budgets from the previous years. When the organization has some constant budgets it will be very difficult to develop new budgets depending on the funds available. For instance when budgeting there are some factors that keeps on changing. For instance the population of people being budgeted and the cost of commodities will always change depending on the rates of population and economic respectively. When are fixed budgets the department may strain a lot to meet the target. The budget can also be very tight such that the programs undergo so many constraints. TheAgencies has had issues with transparency and accountability. Many of the records in the organization are not updated. This is a great challenge to the accountants when doing the audits and financial documents which needs a cash flow of all the activities in the organization. This makes it difficult to do final calculations which help the administrators to budget (Fisher, 2005).

Recommendations

It is advisable that the organization should consider all programs equally without overlooking on some programs. This will help the organization to manage, plan and budget appropriately for the activities. The agency should not have some outstanding budgets. All activities should be flexible for change depending on other factors. There should be a continuation of the department setting up emergency funds to cater for the emerging issues in the department. The department should also strive to update their activities and systems technologically. This would ensure effective systems in the agency like communication and the Pennsylvania department of human services should also strive to deal with redundancies, update technology because it has evolved over the years, work to make communication better, deal with delays, add more staff to its team by creating employment, make sure that they have made their goals achievable and also care for the residents of Pennsylvania. This will increase the amount of money that will be saved by the tax payers (Rieper, &Toulemonde, (Eds.), 2007).

References

Rieper, O., &Toulemonde, J. (Eds.). (2007). Politics and practices of inter-governmental evaluation. Transaction Publishers.

Fisher, J. (2005). Contingency-based research on management control systems: categorization by level of complexity. Journal of accounting literature, 14, 24.

James, C. M. (2006). RAROC based capital budgeting and performance evaluation: a case study of bank capital allocation.